Introduction

In the Documentary unit, we were told to find a subject that we wanted to look into and make a documentary about. We needed to research these topics and go out and interview people on our chosen topic. For example, someone who is doing a study on computers would go and interview someone like a computer engineer or someone who works in Information Technology. After we did these things, we would gather everything got and turn it into a research paper and a news paper article.

My focus with the documentary project was about restaurants and how they set moods for their customers

Start of the project

One of the first assignments we got for this project in English class was to take observational images.

Creating the Documentary Magazine

As a part of the project, we made a magazine using Adobe InDesign. the Image above is one of the sections of my magazine. The illustrations on the page (the pull quote box & cutting board with meat and produce) were all hand drawn by me. To make them, I first drew them on paper then I transferred the drawings into Adobe illustrator to do the line-art and color them. The photos on the page were all taken by me and can be seen in their full form in the gallery in the previous section.

The Animation

For the documentary in animation class, I took the audio from my Interview and turned it into an animation

This is my final product of the documentary project in animation. Looking back on it, I think I should’ve just either skipped or quickly done a storyboard for this animation. Most of my problems with the process stemmed from just taking too long on the storyboarding. A little bit of background info: this wasn’t my original idea for the documentary animation. Initially, I wanted to do an animation on a separate story that Chris told me during our interview. The reason I didn’t do that one is because when I started to animate it, I realized how boring it would end up being to animate and watch. So instead, I decided to animate this story.

Process

There isn’t really much to show for the process. All the characters just came from off the top of my head. No references were made for any of the characters. Its just sort of how I work sometimes for things like this; I just think of how I want a certain scene to look and then I just draw it. That’s also how I did the characters. For the record, I did ask Chris how he wanted to be portrayed in my animation, but he said I could just do what I wanted…So I turned him into a TV.

Diving more into the actual creation of this animation, I first started out with block sketches of how I wanted a characters position to look and then after that, I animated the motions. There was a small problem that I came across during the process. That problem was that the first chunk of animation that I made for this was drawn in a different brush type…this essentially meant that I would need to go back and redraw a lot of the beginning frames.

Reflection

Honestly, This was a fun project. I got to talk about things that I had a bit of interest in and I got to make cool illustrations. I learned how to write an interesting piece of literature that people can actually read and not get bored of. I also learned how to make a cool magazine. I’ve never made anything like this before, and I found the process really fun. And I now know for the future that if I’m going to be making a long animation, I shouldn’t focus on the storyboarding for more than a day if I want to get things done quick

Interviewe

PDF of Transcript here

Thanks

I wanted to first say thank you to Chris for making time for my interview. I know you’re usually really busy and I’m really happy that you made time for my silly little interview!

I would also like to thank both the digital media teacher and English teacher for giving me feedback on both my essay and magazine! I really appreciated the feedback and I feel as though it made my final product even better than it would have been!